by Eva Leigh
“Doesn’t stop for you,” he said softly, “does it?”
“What doesn’t?” She plucked a few chemises from the pile and looked for fabric that was too thin from use, and tears that couldn’t be easily repaired. “Set the usable garments at your feet.”
“Thinking of others.” He set the waistcoat down before picking up a single shoe.
“We’ve no use for lone shoes. Put what can’t be used over here.” She pointed to a spot on the floor, allowing the task to take over so she couldn’t lose herself in the significance of his words. “Ovviamente, I’m not constantly worrying about other people. Need to feed myself, and remember to take a bath now and again.”
“You said you’d been born in Naples, your father was English. That’s what brought you to England.” He studied her. “Yet you wound up in Covent Garden—so I’m guessing your English family didn’t welcome you with open arms.”
Old hurts flared back to life, sharp and cutting like dozens of knives. It didn’t matter that fifteen years had passed since then, she still bled from their wounds. Tersely, she said, “There’s no point in this line of questioning.”
“I mean to decipher you,” he said pensively.
Anger was easier to feel than sadness, and she welcomed its icy simplicity. “I’m not a puzzle, Your Grace.” She wadded up a torn pair of stockings and cast them into the discard pile. “Not something to be solved to help you while away the time.”
“You misunderstand me.” He leaned against the wall. “I crave knowing everything about you, not because I’m bored or in search of a plaything.”
“Then why?” she snapped.
“Because you fascinate me.” He spoke plainly, and his gaze held hers.
Heat stole through her and made a task as simple as breathing into a challenge. Her irritation shifted quickly into something much more dangerous—desire.
To distract herself, she picked through a mound of discarded fans, shawls, and ribbons. Lightly, she said, “My tale isn’t so unique.”
“Indulge me, then.”
Very well. She could talk about this without falling into the trap of feeling. Just speak of it as though it happened to someone else. “You know Thompson Ironworks?”
He straightened. “Can’t find a bridge built within the past thirty years that hasn’t made use of their iron. Stephen Thompson’s richer than half the nobility.”
“My father was Thompson’s son,” she said flatly. “He wanted a Grand Tour just like the aristos. After Paris and Berlin and Zurich, he settled for a time in Napoli, the way all fine gentlemen did to hear our opera and visit the ruins in Pompeii. My mother, she was his housekeeper.”
“Ah.”
“Yes—ah.” She swallowed down the choking that always rose up when she thought of the scoundrel that was her sire. “When she told him she was pregnant, he swore he’d marry her and take her back to England.”
“She believed him?”
Lucia’s mouth twisted as her hands knotted around an Indian shawl. “She’d come to Napoli from her poor village,” she said defensively. “Her heart was open and trusting. To her, there was no reason not to have faith in him.”
There was never any sorrow when she spoke of her father’s death, only the painful absence of feeling, if it was possible to hurt from a lack of emotion rather than a surplus.
“Before any arrangements were made for a return to England,” she said, her words cutting, “he died in an accident. Fell to his death when scaling Vesuvius. My mother mourned him like a widow. She never took another man to her bed after his death. But she couldn’t go back home to her village, not with a bastard in her belly, and an existence even more meager than the one she knew in Napoli. So she remained, and took in washing, or mended, just to make sure I didn’t go hungry.”
She blinked hard, but tears always came whenever Mamma haunted her.
Tom regarded her steadily. But there was no condemnation in his gaze. Instead, she saw him piecing together the fragments of her existence—and what he discovered pained him. “What of you, while your mother worked?”
“Did my share.” She pushed on, determined for him to know everything. If he learned who she truly was, in every way, he might turn from her. Such a repudiation would hurt, but she had to face it, just as she’d faced it before. It hurt less when one jammed the knife in oneself rather than suffer a wound at someone else’s hand.
“The streets of Napoli are full of children,” she continued in a hard voice. “Urchins, you might call them. I was one of them, running errands, making exchanges, always staying a step ahead.” She smiled wryly. “Bartered my way into literacy. My mother kept a few of my father’s English books—sentimentality, you know. There was a poor English painter who lived near us, and I’d steal bread for him in exchange for him teaching me to read.”
“Ingenious,” Tom said, and there was no mistaking the admiration in his voice.
She hadn’t expected that. “Just the will to survive.”
It wasn’t an easy or quiet existence, and too well she recalled the panic and confusion when political factions fought in the street. She shuddered, remembering the twitching bodies at the end of the hangman’s noose when the Parthenopean martyrs were executed in the Largo del Castello.
She’d gone to the execution in hopes of earning some coin from the spectators as she fetched them cooling ices or something to eat. Yet she’d been frozen in terror as men and women met their deaths before a roaring crowd.
All life is precarious. A hero one day, an enemy the next.
“You left that behind to come to England,” he said, bringing her back to the present.
Despite her desire to speak without sentiment, more tears threatened to spill. “My mother died—malaria. I was thirteen.” The dottore had been muzzy with wine, and no help at all, as Mamma sweated and gasped and shuddered. Lucia had laid her body atop her mother’s, trying to hold her still, and feeling the fever burning her flesh. “Before she breathed her last, she urged me to go to England, to find my father’s people. They’d take me in. He was an important man’s son, surely they’d raise his daughter in luxury. So—” She forced her shoulders into an attempt at a shrug, feigning nonchalance, then gathered up the pile of clothing that was salvageable and easily washed. “I went.”
“You were aught but a child.” Tom frowned, following her as she headed downstairs to the laundry. “Naples to England isn’t an easy voyage. Or inexpensive.”
“A few items of my father’s were sold, and I convinced a fisherman to give me passage to Capri, where the English ships docked. I found a British captain willing to take my money for the voyage. The voyage was . . . long.”
She’d been sick and terrified, praying to her mother for relief and courage.
“Turned out,” she said in as offhand a voice as she could manage, “my important grandfather was unimpressed with his bastarda granddaughter. He showed me a letter written to him by my father—making plain the plan to abandon my mother rather than bring her to England.”
“Christ.”
“Again, I learned how to survive, this time in the cold and gray streets of London.”
It had shocked her, the frigid English climate, and the leaden skies, and the fact that life in the big English city was no better than it had been in Napoli. The difference was that here, she was considered a foreigner.
She pushed open the door to the laundry room. Inside, the large copper pot in the hearth steamed. Lucia tossed the shifts, chemises, and shirts into the boiling water, then added wood ash to the mixture. Tom watched with fascination.
She eyed him. “Seen laundry done before?”
“I’ve seen it, surely. Have I washed laundry?” He shook his head. “But I’m keen to try my hand at it.”
“Truly?” she asked, surprised. “It’s messy, hot, and tiring.” She picked up the heavy wooden bat.
“In that case . . .” He shucked his jacket, setting it aside, and then his fingers flew over the butto
ns of his waistcoat before pulling it off. A moment later, he’d tugged off his shirt and put that on the ground, as well.
He stood before her, bare from the waist up.
Dio aiutami.
Her recollections of their night together hadn’t been embroidered by the passage of time. He truly did possess a body that made her mouth water and her hands itch to feel all that taut muscle, and rediscover ridges and planes and the texture of the dark hair that swirled across his chest.
Desire for him was far easier, and much more pleasant, than dwelling on the past.
“How . . .” She wet her dry lips. “How is it a duke has the form of a Roman statue? I thought men of your class did nothing but eat and drink and fuck. You should be soft as pudding, not . . .” Her hand made a vague gesture toward his torso. “. . . Not like this.”
His smirk proved that her words pleased him. “Pugilism thrice weekly, riding, fencing, as well. And never underestimate the health benefits of all that fucking.”
Her body went supple. She’d firsthand experience of the benefit of his sexual experience. “Let’s see if your brawn isn’t merely for display.” She handed him the wooden bat. “Use this to pound the clothes in the tub.”
“As my lady wishes.”
This day was proving to be an unending torment as she watched the shift and play of his muscles as he worked the garments in the tub. Truly, she could earn a goodly amount of coin by charging admission to this display.
“You found yourself without family in a foreign land,” he said between thumps of the bat. “Tell me what happened next.”
The hot glow of her arousal cooled. “Are you not weary of the subject?”
“As I said, you are a source of endless fascination.” A droplet of sweat traced along his pectoral muscles, then dipped over the ridges of his abdomen.
Come tu sei per me. “As you are to me.”
“My story’s not so unusual.” Once more, she reached for a tone of bored indifference, as if she could convince herself to feel nothing. “A girl finds herself alone in a strange place and there’s only so many ways for her to earn her bread—and it’s worse if the girl has no trade or skill.”
“Thus the desire for the girls’ home.” He stopped his labor, his gaze distant and thoughtful. “God, I’d honestly no idea.”
“Didn’t you?” she asked pointedly.
He dragged his forearm across his brow before resuming his work. “Truth is,” he said darkly, “I’ve seen poverty. Seen it, but never known it. Some tenant farmers in Ireland barely scratch a living out of the earth, and when I could, I tucked bits of my supper into my pockets and took them to the barefoot children outside cottages.”
His forehead furrowed. “Forgotten about that,” he said to himself. “Or how I’d get a thrashing from my tutor whenever he caught me sneaking food out of the house. ‘It gives them false hope.’ That’s what he’d say to me between strikes of the cane. ‘A mouthful today, and not a bite tomorrow is crueler than nothing at all.’” He exhaled through his nose. “Damn me, but I ought to do more for Ireland.”
“Perhaps you ought.”
For several minutes, the only sounds in the laundry room came from the pounding of the bat in the tub.
“I still cannot figure it,” he said abruptly. “Why my father would risk the reputation of his family, his name.”
This was simpler to speak of than her past. “He used to interrogate me when I’d come to deliver his portion of the profits. ‘How many guests came to the club with a companion? Were they slow to start rogering each other or did they get to rutting at once? Did more women than men attend, or was it evenly matched?’” She shrugged. “I never questioned what compelled him. So long as he kept the doors open, I knew I had a chance to make my dream of the girls’ home a reality.”
Tom grunted. “Mayhap he liked it, being a respected figure in public, and having this salacious secret.”
“I suspect,” she said drily, “that many men of principle live such double lives. They enjoy the contradiction, the duplicity.”
He continued battering the garments with strokes that grew more and more violent. “What if they’re forced to do things against their will? What if they have to weigh the costs and benefits to every action, and can’t ever honor the wishes of their own heart? Is that deceit, or is it what responsibility demands?”
With each word, he pounded harder and harder. Her heart squeezed—she hadn’t thought of what he faced or the burdens he carried. She’d been focused on her own needs and fears. Yet she saw that he, too, struggled. That was why he was here, to briefly escape the heavy weight of a responsibility that made him do things he didn’t want to do.
For all his wealth and power, he wasn’t free.
“Tom.” But he didn’t seem to hear her, and she placed her hand on his bicep.
He paused, his chest heaving, and sweat slick over his body. “My sister’s happiness depends on me acting contrary to my beliefs. And if I do the wrong thing—if I invest in a business that hurts some, but will net me a profit I can use to help many others—how do I choose? Which is more important.” His jaw tightened. “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.”
“You’ll find your own way,” she said gently.
Brimming with uncertainty, his gaze held hers. “I’m glad one of us believes that.”
Chapter 15
It was nearly impossible to see stars in the night sky above London. Lampposts and smoke choked the atmosphere, and even the half-moon was merely a white smear. Yet as Tom reclined on the roof, his hair still damp from his recent bath, he kept his head tilted back, watching the sky.
Great God, but he was exhausted. Even at a distance, the process of cleaning clothes had always appeared laborious. Yet nothing could have fully prepared him for the grueling work that was doing laundry.
After the garments had been thoroughly pounded with the heavy bat, he and Lucia had rinsed everything in a second tub of cool water. Then had come the wringing. Hells above, the wringing. She couldn’t afford a clothes mangler, so getting the water out of the clothing had been done by human labor. Hours later, his hands were only barely uncramping.
All that to get a bundle of garments ready to be given away.
For all her steely-eyed will to survive, Lucia had a heart that was bigger than London. Perhaps she considered it a liability—but he surely did not.
But could he afford to have a heart where his dealings with Brookhurst were concerned? The question of investing in the Midlands Canal Company continued to gnaw at him, taking bites from his spirit. He’d come to the Orchid Club for a place to hide himself away, but this could not be ignored.
God above, he still did not know what to do.
“Ah, here you are.”
He turned his head to see Lucia peering at him from the attic door.
“Supper’s on the table,” she said, “if you want it.”
His stomach rumbled—it had been many long and taxing hours since he’d last eaten—but he wasn’t yet ready to abandon his contemplation of the sky.
“I’ll be down in a quarter of an hour,” he said. “Begin without me.”
There was a pause. And then, “Care for some company?”
He patted the shingles beside him. “Room for one more.”
After shutting the door behind her, she eased down beside him. Together, they contemplated the city.
“That’s St. George’s tower.” She pointed to the southwest, and the sharp peak and its statue of King George I. “When it’s very still, I can hear the bells toll the hour, and on Sundays, if I’m not at St. Patrick’s in Soho.”
“A Catholic church, yes?”
He felt her tensing. “What of it?”
“My mother, she was Catholic and converted to marry my father. I’ve asked her if she regretted her conversion, but she said a Huguenot, Henry IV of France, became a Catholic to rule Paris, and she’d do the same—in reverse—if it meant becoming my father’s wife.”
“That, too.” He angled a look at her. “Is your faith very important to you?”
She exhaled. “In Napoli, our lives are intertwined with the church. Like this.” She wove her fingers together. “Like everyone in the city, I always looked forward to the celebrations for the miracle of San Gennaro. There are garlands of flowers, and a procession to the Piazza del Duomo. We all wait to see the miracle of the liquefaction. His blood,” she explained at his questioning gaze. “It turns from dry to liquid, and if it doesn’t, we fear disaster.”
At his silence, she said tartly, “You think, like your countrymen, that we’re backward, and superstitious.”
“Faith is a mysterious thing,” he said slowly. “I wish, sometimes, that I had more of it.”
“My mother would have converted, for my father’s sake.”
He knew now the reason for the sorrow in her voice when she spoke of her mother, and he ached for her.
“Given that choice, between love and faith, which would you pick?” Tom tried to speak lightly, but did not quite succeed.
Her laugh was wry. “As you said, faith is mysterious. Yet it doesn’t ruin a person the way love can.”
The bitterness in her words struck him all the way to the center of his being. The injury to her had been so great, she’d developed thick scar tissue all around her, nearly impenetrable. He hated that she’d been hurt so badly, that no one had been there to protect and care for her. Everyone deserved a champion.
“You sound like a cynical rake,” he said.
“I speak from experience,” she replied flatly.
He mulled this over. “When it comes time for me to marry, I’ll do so dutifully, selecting a suitable woman who finds me tolerable enough to endure my touch and bear me an heir.”
She angled a glance at him. “Sounds calculating and cold.”
“That’s the way of things when you’ve the weight of centuries on your back.” Since his earliest days, he’d known that at some point he’d assume the title and have to put aside his needs, his desires, all for the perpetuation of the title and the forging of alliances. No wonder, then, that he’d done everything he could to indulge his most primal, elemental instincts in the time he’d been given. The marital state was for duty, not the heart.